Jack Bishop

The road trip looms large in vibrant paintings.

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The road trip, a favourite Canadian pastime, has been explored by many artists but perhaps never as colourfully as in Jack Bishop’s paintings. His show, Road Trip Playlist, at Newzones Gallery in Calgary, re-examines this classic trope by topping views of the open highway with huge skies rendered in psychedelic pinks, oranges and blues. 

The show, on view until Aug. 27, playfully reimagines Bishop’s frequent trips to New Brunswick from his home in Halifax, where he lives with his wife, Jamie, and their dog, Ted, a 10-year-old husky-shepherd cross. All the paintings are inhabited by the same grey car, which travels on empty asphalt ribbons through vast and sublime landscapes. At the wheel, a roughly hewn Bishop sports a baseball cap, his wife beside him in the passenger seat. Their dog sometimes rides in the back. 

Like all great road trips, Bishop’s paintings are a magical carpet for the senses, whether they evoke the warm glow of a sweet sunset or the wonders of a sky sprinkled with candy-floss clouds. For example, in She was a Daytripper, Sunday Driver Yeah, the small car cruises along the highway, its trippy lights reflecting prisms of colour onto both the dark winter landscape and the sky above. It’s an upbeat scene, like the Beatles song evoked by the title. 

Bush says he became interested in prisms after noticing a lamp with a clear bottom that fractured sunlight from a window at his home.

“It would shoot rainbows, projected onto our walls,” he says. “And I got interested in the idea about how light is all colours, and I started to play around with the headlights as the way of illustrating the abstraction of the light and it being all the colours. A lot of these works are a jumping-off point from there.”

Newzones, with its open-vaulted ceilings and bright white walls, is the perfect setting for his paintings, which are saturated with fluorescent, iridescent and phosphorescent paints that belie the colours we typically associate with the Canadian landscape. Bishop, who graduated from NSCAD University in 2007, creates visual tension by also using flatter, cooler tones, creating a wonderful shimmering effect.

Bishop says fluorescent and iridescent paints almost sit outside the traditional spectrum of colour wheels. “I like the idea of how they’re contemporary materials,” he says. “Using them, the surface just becomes activated.”

Familiar scenes are made extraordinary through titles with musical references, the idiosyncratic use of colours, shapes and textures, as well as the contrasts between flatness and whimsical impastos. Woven together, these elements create orchestrated rhythms. Bishop’s paintings, with their oversized trees, rainbows and pink, puffy clouds, are about capturing a mood or expressing a psychological moment. They reveal an artist who fearlessly mines his own life to offer a fresh take on a familiar adventure.

Jack Bishop, Road Trip Playlist, at Newzones Gallery in Calgary from June 4 to Aug. 27, 2022.

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Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art

730 11 Avenue SW, Calgary, Alberta T2R 0E4

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